Close your eyes and picture a Boba Fett movie made by the guy who directed The Transporter. Looks good, doesn’t it? Well, your imagination is the only place you’ll be able to enjoy that Star Wars dream, I’m afraid, because Louis Leterrier’s pitch was rejected by Lucasfilm.
That’s right, Star Wars fans were so close to getting a big screen story diving into one of the most inexplicably cool Star Wars characters in the galaxy. As far as Star Wars villains go, Boba Fett doesn’t really do much, but he looks badass in that gritty armor, and the idea of the most iconic Star Wars bounty hunter being fleshed out is a tantalizing one. Yes, I know we got The Book of Boba Fett, but I’m choosing to erase that Star Wars series from my memory.
Instead, all I’ll be thinking about now is the fact that Louis Leterrier was never given the chance to make his Boba Fett movie. The director told the Happy Sad Confused podcast: “I had my dream Star Wars idea a long time ago… I was also very interested in the Boba Fett movie.”
Leterrier also pitched a “a lone wolf and cub” story around Obi-Wan Kenobi and Luke Skywalker as a prequel to A New Hope. Sadly, Lucasfilm didn’t fancy taking on either of those projects. Leterrier revealed “they said ‘Uh, we don’t know if that’s a great idea.'”
When you consider Leterrier’s work, the filmmaker has a real knack for putting together invigorating and dynamic action movies. I mentioned The Transporter earlier, but Leterrier is also responsible for the new movie in the Fast and Furious franchise, as well as 2008’s The Incredible Hulk. I’m not saying any of those are among the best movies you’ll ever see, but they sure are a lot of fun.
If Leterrier had been given the chance to imbue Boba Fett with the same kind of wild energy and tongue-in-cheek playfulness he brings to his other work, we would likely have seen a galaxy-spanning adventure movie full of gunslinging bounty hunters, grimy criminal underworlds, and turbo-charged spaceships engaging in dogfights.
As for Leterrier’s idea for seeing what Obi-Wan and young Luke were up to prior to A New Hope… sounds a lot like the premise of the Obi-Wan Kenobi Disney Plus show to me. That said, I’m not really keen on the notion that we need every single gap in the galaxy filling in with these kind of stories. Watching the Star Wars movies in order tells me all I really need to know about the Skywalker family tree.
It’s a shame we never got that Boba Fett movie, and the character got a bit of a raw deal when he was the star of his own show, which definitely lessened his appeal. Maybe we should have left him in the sarlacc pit after all. Still, we have plenty of new Star Wars movies on the way, and you can also learn about the Andor season 2 release date or The Acolyte release date for more cool stories from the galaxy far, far away.